Childhood

Among philosophers, Simone de Beauvoir is unique in treating childhood as a philosophical phenomenon. In both The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, she examines the relationship between childhood and human freedom and considers its role in the development of subjectivity. Despite this, few sustained analyses of her treatment of the phenomenon exist. I argue that Beauvoir's conception of childhood is not uniform, but changes from The Ethics of Ambiguity to The Second Sex. Whereas the former presents children as (...) lacking moral freedom, as not fully sovereign individuals, the latter suggests that children are just as free as adults. When children do not fully possess or exercise freedom, it is not because they are not in a position to do so, but rather because various social institutions hinder them. I find this position useful for developing a phenomenological account of childhood as a site for freedom. Hence, Beauvoir becomes a source for thinking of issues in philosophical anthropology concerning the temporality of human existence and the nature of human agency over a lifespan. (shrink)

Rohingya refugee children in Bangladesh are forced into labour both inside and outside the camps for a wide range of reasons. This article examines this situation in relation to the access to education for those children living in the camps in Cox’s Bazar. Being informed by several perspectives concerning child labour and access to schooling in developing country contexts, this research work has adopted a qualitative approach to study various factors working behind this pressing issue. After collecting data by means (...) of qualitative methods, including non-participant observations and semi-structured interviews, the researcher has analyzed the findings with these informed perspectives. Results show that lack of formal identity, limited access to the formal labour market, absence of social sanctions against child employment, lack of aspirations, household composition, and substandard living conditions are some of the key factors that drive children to engage in various forms of labour, especially outside the camps. They often work in small workshops as labourers and in the host community households as domestic workers. Undocumented children are also reported to become victims of bonded labour, sex trade, and trafficking in the region. The author argues that a lack of formal education has compounded this issue into a severe humanitarian crisis which calls for immediate support and actions from local and international agencies. (shrink)

Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher brings together groundbreaking essays by renowned American philosopher Gareth B. Matthews in three fields he helped to initiate: philosophy in children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood. In addition, contemporary scholars critically assess Matthews’ pioneering efforts and his legacy. Matthews (1929-2011) was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy who had conversations with young children, discovering that they delight in philosophical puzzlement and that their philosophical thinking often enriched his own understanding. Those (...) conversations became the impetus for a substantial component of Matthews’ scholarship, from which this book features essays spanning the length of his career. Contemporary contributors to the book critically evaluate Matthews’ scholarship, showing where he broke new ground and identifying developments and debates in the fields he helped to initiate. They take up pressing challenges, including biased idealizations of childhood in children’s literature; the tensions between teaching philosophy to, and doing philosophy with young people; the merits of theorizing childhood without theorizing children; and how professional philosophy at once desires and resists a return to childhood. This second volume in the Philosophy for Children Founders series is an important resource for philosophers, educators, and anyone interested in children’s philosophical thinking, developmental psychology, what it means to philosophize with children, the nature of childhood, and how children’s literature goes philosophical. It will guide and inspire those who share Matthews’ conviction that the impulse to philosophize begins in early childhood. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the way that the concepts of thought and interest have been described in the three main documents that currently guide Brazilian Child Education – National Education Guidelines and Bases/1996, National Curriculum Guidelines for Child Education/2010, and National Curriculum Basis/2018 for Child Education – and their implications for relations between childhood and thinking. In order to do that, we have relied on studies in the philosophy of difference, considering authors such as Kohan, Larrosa, López and Ribeiro, (...) among others, to problematize thought as linked to individual interest. We notice how much thought has been regarded as a problem-resolution tool in these documents, following a neoliberal logic that has been increasingly displaced from collective to individualized interest. Furthermore, the whole functioning of a disciplinary society is evident in the documents, as the latter moves towards a performance society, with greater emphasis on assessment practices and records of children’s “production.” We consider, both in the concept of childhood and the concept of experience, the possibility of experiencing other relationships with childhoods and temporalities in schools, and the power of both free time and play as open breathing spaces among routines that are both full of compulsory activities and empty of meaning. (shrink)

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged (...) bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’. (shrink)

In this paper, two different philosophical proposals to introduce and carry out philosophy in school spaces which include the participation of children are compared, these are: Philosophy for Children, mainly developed by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, and Philosophy with Children, which is actually a set of “second generation” proposals –as described by Vansieleghem and Kennedy, based on Reed and Johnson –, among which those created by Walter Kohan and Karin Murris, to mention a few, stand out. The text begins (...) with some similarities between both proposals, before comparing them in each of their dimensions. First, P4C is discussed. Second, PwC. Their ideas about education, school, philosophical education, their concept of childhood, the role given to teachers and their relation with politics are the main focus. Third, PwC’s critique of the P4C programme is studied. Finally, the paper concludes with some ideas on the issue of introducing philosophy to the school space. Particularly, PwC’s proposal is supported, fundamentally because of its coherent acknowledgment of the autonomy of teachers and of the political element in education, since philosophical experience with children is particularly questioning, defying, and, therefore, it has the possibility of bringing about important transformations, both at a personal-individual level, as well as a collective one. (shrink)

This article is a discursive examination of children’s status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children’s moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely missing and children’s agency as diminished, deviant or rendered ambiguous. Epistemic injustice applies particularly to disadvantaged children with difficult experiences who run the risk of (...) being othered, or positioned as reproducing or accommodating to the very same social problems they may be victimised by. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the notion of childhood and its place in philosophical education. Childhood is not seen as a developmental state that needs to be overcome, but rather an existential state that constitutes a significant part of being human as well as the dimension of the world itself.

In this paper, I present an experience of philosophical dialogue with small children in a public school in Bari, Italy in the context of the Philosophia Ludens for Children project. I present the experience, including the transcripts of six conversations with several groups of children, and then draw some inferences concerning the importance of the relationship between Universities and schools; the philosophical strength of both children’s commitment and philosophical ideas and their positive understanding of childhood.

This paper is an attempt to connect the Brazilian Paulo Freire’s well known educational thinking with the “philosophy for children” movement. It considers the relationship between the creator of philosophy for children, Matthew Lipman and Freire through different attempts to establish a relationship between these two educators. The paper shows that the relationship between them is not as close as many supporters of P4C have claimed, especially in Latin America. It also considers the context of Educational Policies in our time (...) and why Freire’s understanding of the politics of education makes it impossible to be Freirean and at the same time be neutral or favorable to the actual status quo. Finally, after presenting Lipman’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy, education and democracy and their connection to capitalism, it proposes ways to begin the political path of philosophizing with children inspired by Paulo Freire’s educational thinking. As a result, a more politically committed path to doing philosophy with children is offered. (shrink)

The binary between the figure of the child and the fully human being is invoked with regularity in analyses of race, yet its centrality to the conception of race has never been fully explored. For most commentators, the figure of the child operates as a metaphoric or rhetorical trope, a non-essential strategic tool in the perpetuation of White supremacy. As I show in the following, the child/human binary does not present a contingent or merely rhetorical construction but, rather, a central (...) feature of racialization. Where Black peoples are situated as objects of violence it is often precisely because Blackness has been identified with childhood and childhood is historically identified as the archetypal site of naturalized violence and servitude. I proceed by offering a historical account of how Black peoples came to inherit the subordination and dehumanization of European childhood and how White youth were subsequently spared through their partial categorization as adults. (shrink)

This work rescues a " childish telling" presented in the last section of the master's research, conducted between 2014 and 2016 in the Graduate Program in Education of the Universidade Federal de Alagoas, whose theme brings “OS ENIGMAS DE INFÂNCIA E EXPERIÊNCIAS EM UMA ESCOLA PÚBLICA DA CIDADE DE MACEIÓ/AL: o que revelam?” Thus, this research is an inaugural desire to think childhood in the state of Alagoas. We seek, in this research, to know the daily life of children in (...) order to question which puzzles permeate the childhood and experience theme. For this research, we dialogue with the child of Nietzsche, from this Zarathustra character in "The three Metamorphoses" vision. With Kohan, we make a childish reading of childhood, in a non determined time; the "aion time" of Heraclitus child. Larrosa brings us another understanding of experience in that it, as the child of Nietzsche and childhood in Kohan is used with the intention to break a linguistic comfort that seeks to be consistent and true. The theme of this symposium Mundos que se tecem entre “nosotros”: o ato de educar em uma língua ainda por ser escrita, changes us once it forces us to leave, even for a single moment, the adult language of philosophy and run the risk of writing and listening in a children's language. In this perspective, this work brings one of the master's research records. In it, there is a “childish telling” that a public school draws from its own experiences, whose language cannot be deciphered. And neither could. (shrink)

The family presents an interesting challenge to many conceptions of collective activity and the makeup of social groups. Social philosophers define social groups as being comprised of individuals who knowingly consent to their group membership or voluntarily act to continue their group membership. This notion of voluntarism that is built into the concept of a social group rests upon a narrow conception of agency that is difficult to extend beyond able-minded autonomous adults. Families, however, are often comprised of members who (...) supposedly lack this developed sense of agency and are therefore considered incapable of consenting to join or remain in a group: infants and small children. So, the family seems to be an odd fit for the designation of social group, even though it is often heralded as a paradigm example of one. In this paper I argue that children and infants are in fact agents who are capable of collective intentionality, especially in the context of the family where they act cooperatively and reciprocally with their caretakers. In doing so, I present an understanding of the family as a social group that has degrees of voluntarism for all members in the forms of joint readiness and joint commitment. I argue for this in three steps. First, I employ Margaret Gilbert’s concepts of joint commitment and joint readiness as a framework for collective intentionality. Second, echoing Carol Gould, I argue that we ought to expand our understanding of agency beyond the ideal case. Third, I draw upon recent research from Michael Tomasello that demonstrate a child’s ability to act cooperatively and reciprocally. Together these steps provide a strong foundation for the claim that children and infants are agents capable of collective intentionality within families. (shrink)

Some philosophers claim that young children cannot do philosophy. This paper examines some of those claims, and puts forward arguments against them. Our beliefs that children cannot do philosophy are based on philosophical assumptions about children, their thinking and about philosophy. Many of those assumptions remain unquestioned by critics of Philosophy with Children. My conclusion is that the idea that very young children can do philosophy has not only significant consequences for how we should educate young children, but also for (...) how adults should do philosophy; and that further research is urgently needed. (shrink)

Like most philosophers, Heidegger gave little attention to childhood, but his philosophical emphasis on pre-reflective practice and understanding seems uniquely qualified to help make sense of a child’s experience and development. Moreover, it seems to me that many central Heideggerian concepts are best defended, exemplified, and articulated by bringing child development into the discussion. A Heideggerain emphasis on pre-theoretical world-involvement opens up a rich array of phenomena for studying child development, which can improve upon standard theories that have over-emphasized exclusive (...) conditions or criteria. I begin by laying out some basic features of Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world as a preparation for understanding the world of the child. Then I will briefly discuss some of Heidegger’s remarks on childhood, followed by some reflections on language acquisition and the correlation of anxiety and meaning. (shrink)

Settler colonialism is structured in part according to the principle of civilizational progress yet the roots of this doctrine are not well understood. Disparate ideas of progress and practices related to colonial dispossession and domination can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and as far back as ancient Greece, but there remain unexplored logics and continuities. I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of (...) the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children. To illustrate how the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries, I trace the various historical iterations of the political/childhood opposition through the classical, medieval, enlightenment, and modern eras. I show how the model of civilizational progress from a premodern and savage state of childhood continues to serve as the model for settler colonial exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The philosophy for children curriculum was specially written by Matthew Lipman and colleagues for the teaching of philosophy by non-philosophically educated teachers from foundation phase to further education colleges. In this article I argue that such a curriculum is neither a necessary, not a sufficient condition for the teaching of philosophical thinking. The philosophical knowledge and pedagogical tact of the teacher remains salient, in that the open-ended and unpredictable nature of philosophical enquiry demands of teachers to think in the moment (...) and draw on their own knowledge and experience of academic philosophy. Providing specialist training or induction in the P4C curriculum cannot and should not replace undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in academic philosophy at universities. However, although for academic philosophers the use of the P4C curriculum could be beneficial, I will argue that its use poses the risk of wanting to form children into the ideal ‘abnormal’ child, the thinking child—the adult philosopher’s child positioned as such by the Lipman novels. The notion of narrativity is central in my argument. With the help of two picturebooks—The Three Pigs by David Weisner and Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne—I illustrate my claim that philosophy as ‘side-shadowing’ or meta-thinking can only be generated in the space ‘in between’ text, child and educator, thereby foregrounding a ‘pedagogy of exposure’ rather than ‘teacher proof’ texts. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty not only published in the fields of phenomenology, aesthetics, politics, and linguistics, but he also lectured as professor of child psychology, which resulted in several texts specifically devoted to the child. Most notably are the works “The Child’s Relations to Others,” Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, and Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures, 1949–1952. And yet the question of the child occurs throughout his entire corpus. Thus, it is quite difficult to limit Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of childhood (...) to one given text or theme. Merleau-Ponty is adamant, however, that his work in psychology and philosophy should not be viewed as separate projects. Rather, he repeatedly stresses an intertwining of philosophy and psychology, self and other, theory and praxis, and the lasting influence of childhood on adult life. In this vein, the following texts, both from his “philosophical” and “psychological” works, provide a sense of the significance the child plays in Merleau-Ponty’s overarching project, particularly in his account of intersubjectivity and the parent-child relation. (shrink)

Political philosophy presents a static conception of childhood as a state of lack, a condition where intellectual, physical, and moral capacities are undeveloped. This view, referred to by David Kennedy as the deficit view of childhood, is problematic because it systematically disparages certain universal features of humanity—dependency and growth—and incorrectly characterizes them as features of childhood only. Thus there is a strict separation between childhood and adulthood because adults are characterized as fully autonomous agents who have reached the end of (...) their moral and cognitive development. I argue that this view is mistaken, and limits both the developmental abilities of adults and ongoing moral development within an organized state. I propose that we view dependency as a human condition. By doing so, children and adults form the kind of relationship with one another that encourages the growth and development of our moral sense in both childhood and adulthood. (shrink)

Setting forth from some of Foucault's theoretical and methodological premises, this paper aims at problematizing the contemporary discursive automatisms imposed on childhood, which endow it with an aura of bliss and consecrate it with the role of sowing all things, while, at the same time, they apply to it the taint of incontinence, corruption and subservience, thus attempting against its errancy, originality and therefore its generativity. The procedure adopted is an unlikely interweaving of multiple vocalizations about childhood. In a Barthesian (...) style, we chose an ensemble of discontinuous fragments of classical theoretical texts, journalistic accounts and literary works; all interspersed either by slogans fond to what is commonly called the industrial culture or by striking passages of popular songs. Together, such fragments finally compose a brief and unusual compendium of things actually said not only on childhood, but also for it, if not on its behalf. The strategy of textual composition carried out is that of the bricolage of such shared, ordinary childhood statements, aiming at shuffling the authorial sources. In other words, what interests us is a sort of distorted, hyperbolic, even monstrous repetition of certain discursive fulgurations about the world and the life of children, beyond or beneath the borders of their original enunciative territory. Moreover, it’s about rubbing such statements and, perhaps, making them short-circuit and, ultimately, raving them, in order to reverberate not only the movement of repetition present in them, but also their fissures, their blind or shaky spots; exhaustion spots; turning points, perhaps. We should also clarify that we do not intend either to describe, or to interpret the discursive contents that mark the childhood drumbeat routine; we only intend to bring out, once again, the circular and reiterative ingenuity which animates them. In doing so, we shall stoke their operating nerves and ridges, temporarily displacing the statements of their totalizing pretensions. Subjected to a forceful displacement of their enunciative jurisdiction, when caught in their arbitrariness, boastfulness and, ultimately, in their vulnerability, these statements perhaps start acting like circus mirrors which don’t reflect, don’t represent, don’t aim at being the herald of truth, but rather caricature the image of whomever stands in front of them in search of a revelation. This procedure is justified not by the resort to an allegedly unorthodox, fancy or clandestine method in relation to the protocols of "good manners" in expression, but by the invocation of an intemperate, eager manner of critical addressing to the robust and even crackly performativity of the type of experience handed down to childhood – taken this performativity not only as an automatic effect of a relentless dispositif, but precisely as a "focus of experience", according to Foucault’s concept of this term. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a compendium of excerpts of Plato´s dialogues on childhood. We have collected the major references to children and childhood through Plato’s opus, and divided them between those categorizations of children which can be as small as phrases which use “child” as an example of a certain kind of disposition or character; and those passages which deal with the education of children. Of course the two books in which Plato speaks most of children and childhood—Laws and (...) The Republic—are both devoted in varying degrees to systematic education, and space does not permit us to include any but the most salient elements of his very broadly conceived scheme, which naturally extends backwards into the procreation of children, and before that, the management of union between the sexes, and the purposes of procreation. As for Plato’s attitude towards children, we will leave the reader to evaluate that, but we offer several questions: 1) What does Plato’s view of childhood imply about his view of adulthood? 2) Can Plato be understood to have held views of childhood any different from his contemporaries? 3) What are the political implications of Plato’s views of childhood—especially given his frequent association of children with women, slaves, and the “ignorant multitude”? 4) What do Plato’s views of childhood matter to his philosophy as a whole? 5) And finally, what do they matter to the understanding of children as philosophers themselves? (shrink)

s Sleeping persons do not seem to be agents, to express identity or to give voice. On one view this means that social research on sleep would do best to focus on the social context of sleep rather than sleep `itself'. If the only analytic vocabulary at our disposal consists of abstractions that assume the existence of self-conscious, self-present individuals, this conclusion is probably correct. This article, however, builds on the work of some contemporary childhood researchers to offer an account (...) of the `person' as an emergent property of distributed interactions between heterogeneous elements. The account is built through a discussion of `transitional objects' and `affects'. It is argued that this version of the `person' could help social research to make sense of both sides of the awake/asleep threshold. The potential contribution of this approach to the emerging bio-politics of childhood and states of un/consciousness is discussed. (shrink)

Classical conceptual distinctions in philosophy of education assume an individualistic subjectivity and hide the learning that can take place in the space between child (as educator) and adult (as learner). Grounded in two examples from experience I develop the argument that adults often put metaphorical sticks in their ears in their educational encounters with children. Hearers’ prejudices cause them to miss out on knowledge offered by the child, but not heard by the adult. This has to do with how adults (...) view education, knowledge, as much as child, and is even more extreme when child is also black. The idea is what Miranda Fricker calls ‘epistemic injustice’ which occurs when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Although her work concerns gender and race, I extrapolate her radical ideas to (black) child. Awareness of the epistemic injustice that is done to children and my proposal for increased epistemic modesty and epistemic equality could help transform pedagogical spaces to include child subjects as educators. A way forward is suggested that involves ‘cracking’ the concept of child and a different nonindividualised conception of education. (shrink)

This fully revised second edition suggests ways in which you can introduce philosophical enquiry to your Personal, Social and Health Education and Citizenship teaching and across the curriculum.